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Friday, 29 July 2016

Putin's after the voting machines now

A
crescendo of hysteria from the Washington Post

Russia
was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s
computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal
emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence
agencies have reportedly concluded.... This kind of cyberattack
targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the
possibility of an even worse problem in November — that our
election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a
similar attack.

If
foreign governments learn that they can influence our elections with
impunity, this opens the door for future manipulations, both document
thefts and dumps like this one that we see and more subtle
manipulations that we don’t see.....

Retaliation
is politically fraught and could have serious consequences, but this
is an attack against our democracy....

Even
more important, we need to secure our election systems before autumn.
If Putin’s government has already used a cyberattack to attempt
to help Trump
win,
there’s no reason to believe he won’t do it again — especially
now that Trump
is inviting the “help.”

We no longerhave
time for
that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of
security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’
resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and
take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.

Longer
term, we need to return to election systems that are secure from
manipulation. This means voting machines with voter-verified paper
audit trails,
and noInternetvoting. I
know it’s slower and less convenient to stick to the old-fashioned
way, but the security risks are simply too great.

All
this is worthy of Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany!

This article's headline points out the inconvenient truth while buying the line of Putin interfering in the political process